Deportation cases were dropped against approximately 200,000 migrants because the Department of Homeland Security under President Joe Biden failed to file thousands of notices to appear before their court dates, leaving immigration courts no jurisdiction to handle deportation cases or rule on asylum claims, a new report says.

“These large numbers of dismissals and what then happens raises serious concerns,” according to the document, released by the Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), the New York Post reported Wednesday night.

It was “troubling” there was an “almost total lack of transparency on where and why these DHS failures occurred,” the nonpartisan research organization commented in the report.

“Equally troubling is the lack of solid information on what happened to these many immigrants when DHS never rectified its failure by reissuing and filing new NTAs to restart their court cases,” it added.

Migrants who are stopped while illegally crossing the U.S. border are issued the notices to appear, or NTAs and assigned a hearing date, which is often years away, to appear before a judge to present their case about why they should not be deported.

The NTA, however, must also be filed with the court, as almost all of them are removal cases, meaning the DHS must file the documents to allow the case to proceed, according to TRAC’s report.

The cases that have been dismissed because NTAs were not filed jumped after President Joe Biden took office, climbing from 6,482 in 2020 to 33,802 in 2021.

Further, in Biden’s first three years in office:

• 8.4% of deportation cases were dismissed because NTAs were not filed with the courts, while between 2014 and 2020, less than 1% of cases were dismissed for that reason.
• Failure to file NTAs climbed to 79,592 in 2022 and 68,869 in 2023.
• So far this year, 10,598 deportation cases have been dismissed because of no NTAs, according to the report.

The DHS, however, only rectifies the dismissals for one out of four migrants where the NTAs were not filed, and even then, the second NTA was filed with the court late on almost 2,000 occasions, the report said.

Immigration courts in Houston and Miami were the “clear standouts” for not having NTAs that were filed on time, and 50% or more of the deportation cases that were dismissed from those courts since 2021 were because there were no NTAs.

The issue could also be because Border Patrol agents and DHS personnel have the authority to schedule, the TRAC report suggested.

“DHS’s relatively recent access to the court’s scheduling system created a new administrative problem,” the report said. “DHS employees could schedule immigration court hearings sooner than the agency could file the NTA, and this could have negative consequences for both the immigration court and the immigrant respondents themselves.”

The report noted that the court delays also cause problems for asylum seekers, who cannot obtain work permits without formally filing an asylum petition.

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